Chapter 6 Flint
six
Flint
Reid is normally late for work. Today, he finds me at six in the morning working by headlamp.
He doesn't say anything at first — just sets his thermos down and pours two cups and puts one on the bench near me and goes to the far wall and looks at the Jamie stone, which is nearly done now.
I've been at it since four. The lettering is cut.
The surface texture is finished. The only thing left is the edge work on the base, which I can have done by noon.
"What happened?" he says.
I tell him. Not all of it — Reid doesn't need all of it. But enough: that Ivy might leave, that her partner took a project and walked, that she told me and I didn't say what I should have said.
He's quiet for a while. "What did you say?"
"That what I wanted wasn't the same as what I'd say."
Reid puts down his cup. He looks at me with the expression he gets when he's about to say something he's thought out carefully. He does this rarely. When he does it, I listen.
"You let her think it wasn't decided between you," he says.
"It's her decision. Her business, her life."
"That's not the same thing as saying nothing." He picks the cup back up. "She's not a stone. She doesn't know which direction she wants to go just because you know. You have to tell her."
I look at the Jamie stone.
"You've been working on that piece for three months," Reid says. "And now it's almost done. What changed?"
He knows what changed. He's asking me to say it.
"She showed me what it was supposed to be," I say.
He nods. Drinks his coffee. Doesn't say anything else, because he knows that's enough.
I finish the edge work at noon. The Jamie stone is done.
It's exactly what it needed to be. The shape is somewhere between a standing figure and a geological formation — something that started as stone and decided partway through to be a person, or the other way around.
The quartz vein runs through it diagonally, silver-white against the gray-green, and the lettering along the base is deep-cut and clean: Jamie Bird.
He went in anyway. Ivy's phrase. She doesn't know I used it. I'll tell her.
I call Reid and he brings the equipment truck.
We move the stone to the site.
Setting stone by hand is the old way, before machinery made it faster and less careful.
You dig the setting bed precisely — the depth has to account for the stone's weight and the soil's drainage and the frost heave this hillside will see every winter.
You set the stone in, you true it, you read it from every angle.
You back-fill and tamp and read it again.
You take your time. Machinery is faster.
Machinery also doesn't tell you when something's wrong.
Your hands tell you when something's wrong.
I'm tamping the setting bed when I hear the car on the road below.
I don't look up. I hear her door, her footsteps on the slope. I know her footsteps now — she places her feet deliberately, always reading the grade, always making a decision about where she puts her weight. She stops about ten feet from me and I can feel her looking at the stone.
I tamp the final section. I straighten up. I step back and look at the stone in its place.
It's right. It's exactly right. The slope behind it, the soil around it, the direction it faces — south-southwest, so it catches the afternoon light and throws it back into the face of anyone standing in the approach path.
I knew that was right on paper. It's different to know it in the actual stone, in the actual ground.
I look at her.
She's looking at the stone. Then at me. Her eyes are steady.
"I want you to stay," I say. "I'm not going to pretend I don't."
She doesn't say anything.
"But if you go, I'll still carve this right. Because you showed me what it should be." I look back at the stone. "That doesn't go away. Whatever you decide."
She walks toward me.
She doesn't say anything else and neither do I, because the hill is saying it, and the stone is saying it, and the valley below us with the river through it and the town at its edge is saying it.
She comes to me and puts both hands on my chest and looks up at me and the look on her face is the look of someone who has made the clearest decision of her life.
Here's the complete scene, all the way through to the stone:
The light is failing when I lower her down into the grass.
The slope is still warm. Southwest-facing — I've been reading this hill long enough to know how it holds heat. The grass is dry under my jacket. First stars coming up in the east.
She looks at me. I look back. Neither of us says anything because there's nothing that needs saying.
I take her shirt off. She gets mine. Her hands are sure — no hesitation in them. Cold air hits my back and I pull her in before she can feel it, her chest against mine, her skin warmer than the hillside.
I work my way down her throat. The hollow of her collarbone.
The place just below her ear that makes her go still and grip whatever she can reach.
I get her bra off and take her breast in my mouth and her back arches hard off the grass.
I spend time there — thumb on one side, mouth on the other — until she's pulling at my hair trying to move me somewhere else.
I take my time getting there.
I get the rest of her clothes off and sit back on my heels and look at her in the last of the light. Long enough that she reaches for me.
"Come here," she says.
"Not yet."
I go down and get my mouth on her pussy and her thighs snap together against my shoulders before she forces them back open.
I start slow — flat of my tongue across her clit, no rush — and she makes a sound through her teeth and pushes her hips up.
I press them back down with my forearm and keep the pace I want, not hers. Not yet.
Her hand finds my hair. Grips.
I work her clit until her breathing goes ragged, until the hand in my hair stops guiding and just holds on.
I slide two fingers inside her and curl them and her stomach pulls tight and she says fuck under her breath like she didn't mean to say it out loud.
I feel her get wetter around my fingers.
Her thighs are shaking now, small tremors she can't control.
I don't stop.
She comes with her hips grinding up into my face and her fist yanking my hair and my name tearing out of her throat — my first name, the one I buried at twenty-two, the one she picked up the first week like it belonged to her and never put it down.
I come back up and she's already reaching for me.
Gets her hand around my cock before I've settled my weight and strokes me once, slow, watching my face while she does it.
I press my jaw to her temple and breathe through it.
She does it again. Tighter this time. Patient and deliberate, like she's paying me back for every minute I spent downstairs.
"Now," she says.
I push into her slow and feel every inch of the heat of her pussy around my cock, the way she pulls a breath in through her nose and holds it as she takes me. I bottom out and stop. Her legs lock around me. Her nails find my back.
I pull out and drive back in and she exhales hard against my ear.
Again. She tilts her hips to take me deeper and I give her the angle and she bites down on my shoulder softly.
Her whole body moving with me now. I get a hand under her hip and hold her where I want her and she says right there, don't stop and I stay exactly there, same depth, same angle, and work her until her legs start shaking again.
"Harder," she says.
I give her harder. Her pussy tightens around my cock and she tips her head back into the grass and says my name again and I feel it in my chest the same place I always do.
She comes the second time with her face turned into my neck, shaking, and I go right after her with my forehead dropped to her shoulder, hands fisted in the grass on either side of her, both of us out in the open air with the whole valley below and nothing above us but stars.
I don't move for a long time.
She keeps her hands in my hair. The stars are properly out now, east to west. The only sound coming up from the valley is the river.
After a while I reach into my coat pocket.
Flat stone. Palm-sized. Same gray-green granite as the piece she brought me the first week. One face polished smooth, one face rough.
I put it in her hand.
She lifts it. Turns it. Reads it with her fingers before her eyes can.
Daniel. Just his name. Cut deep and clean — no flourish, nothing extra. Just the name, held permanently in something that lasts.
She holds it a long time without speaking, letting out a soft sob. A sound of healing more than grief.
I let her.